Historical November–December 1998 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
We’re new!
My husband, Derek, and I moved into a house on the 6100 block of McPherson Avenue last summer; it’s our first real house, and in retrospect, our first real neighborhood.
We came to St. Louis from Washington, DC nearly three years ago. Derek and I met in graduate school there, and after our wedding moved into a tiny basement apartment in the very urban Washington neighborhood of DuPont Circle. Living there was great for access to places, but not so great for access to people.
We were within easy walking distance to work, and the grocery store was just blocks away as were public transportation, restaurants, dry cleaners and drug stores.
We had a car, but rarely used it because we rarely needed it. And although DuPont Circle is a fairly dense and certainly diverse neighborhood, it is not a particularly neighborly one.
The building where we lived had the Moroccan Embassy on one side and an art gallery on the other, yet after two years I didn’t know the names of anyone on the block.
In 1996, we decided to move because we weren’t sure we wanted to put down permanent roots inside the Capital Beltway, and expanding professional opportunities led us to the St. Louis area.
We first settled in a rented historic home in Alton, Illinois.
The rent was a bargain by Washington standards, and we were glad to have family living closeby. Having both grown up in larger cities, Derek and I enjoyed the community Halloween parade and other elements of small town life.
We got to know our next-door neighbors, and a few others in the community.
But we didn’t enjoy the commute to Creve Coeur and back every day.
The transition from a twenty-minute walk to work in DC to 45 minutes in the car each way to St. Louis did not exactly seem like progress. Someone told us we needed to live in the place we wanted to be on the weekends, and more often than not we found ourselves traversing the Clark Bridge to Missouri at least once a weekend for shopping, restaurants and friends.
We began to think about moving again.
A friend of mine at work, Linda Nodiff, had been singing the praises of SkinkerDeBaliviere from the moment we began working together. It’s a stable, close-knit neighborhood with beautiful old houses, she said, within walking distance of the U-City Loop, Forest Park and MetroLink. Not completely taking her word for it, we randomly attended open houses in neighborhoods all around the city for months before we even spoke with a realtor.
We found the same situation everywhere; compared with Skinker-DeBaliviere, we could get less house for the money, less diverse communities, and plenty of places where we’d have to get in a car to go anywhere beyond the end of the block.
A conversation over dinner in the U-City Loop with Linda and her husband, Marv, ultimately sealed our fate.
When we finally did contact an agent (Karleen Hoerr), we were able to identify in no uncertain terms„the few square blocks in the City of St. Louis we wanted to call home: The day we moved in, before our boxes had even arrived, people from up and down the block dropped by to welcome us. Since then, we’ve been showered with fresh-baked bread, homemade brownies and fresh-picked basil and been invited to several get-togethers on the block and around the neighborhood. We’ve borrowed tools, helped carry in groceries, and shared house keys and alarm codes with our neighbors. We’ve walked to the Park, to the Loop and to the MetroLink. Living here is everything I ever thought a neighborhood should be and my appreciation of Skinker-DeBaliviere continues to grow. Earlier this fall, the Coro Women in Leadership class held a field day focusing on community assets. Half of our group went on “windshield surveys” and interviews with community leaders in one neighborhood; half went to another.
My group was sent to SkinkerDeBaliviere.
It was an opportunity for me to see again the place I live from the perspective of people unfamiliar with it.
From our cars, we counted businesses, places of worship, parks, social services, educational institutions, community newspapers and gardens.
We noted evidence of neighborhood identity, political activism, and the diversity of residential populations.
We spoke with people who have been instrumental in the long course of decisions, beginning almost thirty years ago, that have made this neighborhood the place it is now. At the end of that day, I was even happier than I was at the beginning of it to call this neighborhood home. Even when we were unfamiliar with it, Derek and I quickly saw the assets that led us to choose this particular neighborhood among all others in the St. Louis region.
As we grow to appreciate these assets more by the day, we are also becoming aware of the hard work it takes to keep a community like this alive. It’s a new house, a new neighborhood, and a new way of living for us. And we look forward to doing our part in facing the challenges and opportunities of being good neighbors.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, November–December 1998.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1998_11.pdf, printed page(s) 3; PDF page(s) 3.
